Search engines provide a powerful tool for locating content in documents in a large database of documents, such as the documents on the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW), or the documents stored on the computers of an Intranet. The documents are located using an index of documents in response to a search query, consisting of one or more words, terms, keywords and/or phrases, that is submitted by a user.
Returning search results that closely match, or ideally, that do match a user's search query is a desired characteristic of search engines. This is especially the case in the current environment where there are ever increasing amounts of information. In addition, returning results promptly is also a desired characteristic.
The heterogeneous nature of search queries poses a challenge for processing them efficiently. Search queries are often free-form. The set of queries and the corresponding categories of information and/or content are not pre-defined. As a consequence, it may be difficult to efficiently access databases containing the index of documents and/or content corresponding to the index of documents. Furthermore, resources, such as memory, available for processing a respective set of operations, such as accessing a database, may be constrained by the sheer number of services that are running on the search engine at a given time. Pre-screening or simulating database access operations to determine if it is likely that corresponding information may be present in the database could improve the utilization of resources and the overall performance of search engines. There is a need, therefore, for search engines having such simulation capability.